My brother has a friend who teaches Elders Quorum lessons. To prepare for his lessons, he finds conference talks on the subject he is teaching, plays the audio files and extracts brief clips from the talks. He saves these clips as mp3 files, burns them on a CD then takes them to church. During the lesson, he'll play each audio clip.

There is power in words, especially when the audio clips are delivered in the voice of the original speaker. Contrast that with our normal practice of asking someone to read a quote from a church leaders. Sometimes the quote is read with sincerity and power, but sometimes, especially on the first reading, it is hard to emphasize what really needs to be emphasized.

The problem is, it should be easy for any church teacher with an mp3 player to quickly find and download any audio clip from general conference or from other audio files. And I'm not talking about the 2 hour conference audio from an entire session of conference, or even a single talk. I'm talking about a 30-second or 60-second or 2-minute clip from a conference talk, that someone loved, and took to the time to extract, and then was willing to tag and share with anyone else.

If a few hundred church members helped with this project, and identified brief but powerful audio clips from conference talks, and then made them easy to find and download, then perhaps more teachers would use audio clips in their Sunday lessons, or in home teaching visits, etc.

I hired a developer to build a site called LDSCLIP.com, and he started work on it, but I ran out of funds. What I'd like to do is Open Source LDSCLIP.com, and turn this into a community project with the goal of enabling file sharing of short audio clips that can be used in teaching (or personal study).

Welcome to the LDS Tech Forums! I am thrilled to have your input on this site as I occaisonally visit your blog. You've had some pretty significant accomplishments and your ideas are terrific.

As for this one, I think it is a splendid idea. Joel Dehlin, in the online Tech Talk 2 weeks ago, mentioned that a few of the ideas going around for Church-sponsered, Community-developed projects were around Gospel Study and Lesson Preparations (for Church or FHE). To me, this idea sounds like it could be right up that alley.

If it's Church-sponsered, wouldn't that get rid of any copyright concerns (if there were any)?

I like the idea of a Church operated cloud web site where all of these audio, video, presentations, and training clips could be available. Such a site could have tools for members to go there and prepare a lesson and then access their lesson materials from a computer at the Church (tools to create video clips from talks and tools to prepare presentations and training materials to use in lessons and share with other users of the site). This computer could be available at the Meetinghouse Library on a cart with a large HDTV and wireless internet. There is another thread where a similar idea was presented and I posted a similar response. Such a site could be developed here by the community as another open source project.

Church sponsorship for such an idea would be wonderful and could easily take away the copyright concerns.

Even without church sponsorship, fair use should allow short clips to be used and shared, but I don't know what the law says. For books there are pretty clear rules about how much you can copy or quote. But for audio clips? Do you limit the clip to a percentage of the total audio recording time, or is there a 30-second, 60-second rule, 2-minute rule, or what?

The primary goal of the LDSCLIP.COM project was to make it super easy for members to find and play very powerful very short clips in the classroom.

The site works somewhat. You can upload clips. And download them too. And I think someone at LDSAUDIO.COM has been uploading excerpts from the scriptures. But they are too long to be played in the classroom. And not in the voice of the original author.

If someone wanted to improve the front-end design of the site and someone else wanted to work on the back-end code, and then if we could find some volunteers to do short but powerful clips from recent conference talks, and tag them, we could make this site useful very quickly.

Trent Miskin of FundingUniverse.com was the developer on the project, both front and back, but for some reason he didn't want to keep working on it when the money ran out!